Friday, 2 February 2018

By the time you finish reading this you will either a) despise me with such seething contempt that you
will draft a death threat on the nearest piece of paper to hand or b) your
faith in humanity will be restored. If social media is a credible yardstick of popular middle-class outrage then I suspect that you will feel the
former, but either way I hope you read to the end…

It’s a cringing, groan-inducing cliché but bear with me. I am the most open-minded and laid-back person that you will ever
meet. I realise that is something many people say to appear approachable and endearing, but I rarely get upset (I think
I once lost my temper back in the late nineties), my tolerance for offence
is very high and my humour is disturbingly dark. In fact some of those closest
and dearest to me consider it their ultimate goal in life to successfully cause great offence to me. So when I say that I am rapidly approaching thermonuclear rage then you know that something seismic has happened to cause it.

Last year, having had my fill of a long series of ranty
man-hating tweets in my timeline, I posted the following subtweet:

This tweet stopped a lot of people in their tracks. There
was a palpable open-mouthed shock online. A few raged about it. Some quietly commended
me on ‘speaking out’. The tweet prompted a conversation with a strong-minded feminist
friend of mine who was incandescent upon further discovering that I - a professional
woman with a PhD - would happily give up my work if I married someone who preferred
me to be a stay-at-home housewife. Or that I would love to have the body of a
supermodel and be paraded in next-to-nothing at fashion shows and sports events.
No I didn’t consider the ‘Beach Body Ready’ ad campaign to be offensive and I
thought the model in the poster looked amazing. Would I wear high heels
and a short dress for an evening and grin-and-bear-it while men leered at me in
order to raise thousands of pounds for a children’s charity? Most probably (so
long as I was allowed to glass anyone getting too gropey without permission). As
I explained to my friend – I’m not preachy about my views on my own femininity,
I don’t wish to prove or disprove anything in particular by holding these views, nor do I insist
that others adopt the same approach, it is simply my natural inclination.

Since then I have been doing some soul-searching to investigate why my opinions caused offence and a combination of factors may have contributed to my position. I was
raised as a tomboy with a fiercely independent mind but I was also exposed to a great deal of sassy sexuality. We had prints of Gil Elvgren's pin-up girls on the walls at home, my
parents adored Freddie Mercury and my first crush was on Frank-N-Furter from
The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I had posters of women from burlesque shows on the walls
of my teenage bedroom and worshipped female entertainers like Dita Von Teese. Sexuality
was something fun and it could be innocently exploited for entertainment value.
At school I performed well academically but day-to-day survival depended upon social
acceptance amongst both the girls and the boys in my class. I found equal delight
in a high score in an exam and a compliment on my appearance from a boy. Both made me feel good
about myself. While taking my A-levels I worked as a model for a local artist
and I later modelled for a designer fashion label, but although internally
confident I was painfully shy and not particularly ‘girly’ – I didn’t wear
make-up or dresses and I was into geek culture in a big way so I spent most of
my time hanging around with boys. My childhood best friend was a popular-in-class
Afro-Caribbean boy and we spent every hour of every day together. There was never
a physical attraction between us, his sharp humour and relaxed personality sat
well with my own. My male friends outnumbered my female friends and I
considered them all to be equals - if they hurt or upset me then they did it
because they were dicks and not because of any gender difference.

So that’s the melting pot that I’m working with – a
childhood with mostly male friends, an irreverent and accommodating personality,
and a love of sassy sexuality and feminine charms.

I can’t recall when I first became aware of the latest strain
of feminism, it crept up on me through a variety of sources – the media,
magazines, the beginnings of social media – but it was around the time that I
started university when I encountered the first seeds of feminist outrage.
Women began sneering at other women who worked as models and insisting that
they covered their bodies because they were being ‘exploited’ by men within the
fashion industry. The concept of exploitation in this context was completely
alien to me. Was I being exploited when I worked for that local artist? I’m
pretty sure that was my decision. Was I wrong to do that modelling in my late
teens? I’m pretty sure that was my decision too. Did these women want to stop
me wearing a short dress when I go out on a Saturday night with my friends? Hold
on a second. I had been raised in a society that told me to express my
individuality, celebrate my body and embrace the empowering ‘girl power’ of the
Spice Girls, and now I was being told that I must abide by a set of social
rules dictating what I could and couldn’t wear and how I should and shouldn’t
behave? And these rules had been invented by women who claimed to be standing
up for my rights and freedom of expression?!

Then followed a wave of sexual assault allegations and the
spotlight turned on men in general and their behaviour around women. Was the
media accusing all men of being sexual predators? What about my male friends?
Surely not them? I watched with horror as the men in my life begin to react respectfully
to these sensitivities (which was admirable) but I also leapt to their defence.
Yes there are creepy and dangerous guys out there and women need to be aware of
their existence, but it was cruel to make sweeping generalisations of all men. I
would be horrified if my male friends withdrew from our friendship due to insecurities
in my presence. I reminded male friends that nothing had changed between us
amid these increasing tensions – they should not treat me any differently than
normal and if they ever wronged me then they did so as contemptable human
beings, not as evil men picking on an innocent and simpering woman. I admit
that this blanket approach has effectively eradicated some of the most
predatory in our communities; however the panicked scattergun nature of the warnings has hit some of
the most vulnerable too. I wrote an article recently in response to scattergun attacks on men in academia and the noticeable impact that this had on their behaviour. I
worry too about a couple of friends who are very nervous around women and I
suspect that a fear of causing offence has called a halt to any chances that
they have to meet a partner!

Allegations of unacceptable behaviour and cries of
exploitation have been escalating for a while, but I had no idea that these accusations
would grow into the colossal slew of outrage that we are now experiencing. This
outrage manifests itself in a different form each day – only this week we have
seen the withdrawal of grid girls at F1 races and the removal of ‘offensive’ artwork
from galleries. And, by and large, it’s mostly batshitcraziness. A few years
ago if you told me you were a feminist then I would be impressed and intrigued and ask you to tell me more about
the worthy causes that you are fighting to call out injustices against women.
Nowadays when someone tells me they are a ‘feminist’ I retreat into the
farthest corner of the room until I can ascertain whether that person is a devotee
of the man-hating, scream-at-the-sky, attention-seeking fascist regime shitshow that modern feminism
has become. The truth is, while a few genuine old-school
feminists still exist and many horrifying mistreatments of women take place
every day that need to be addressed, I suspect
that some modern-day ‘feminists’ despise even the most blameless of men and look
for any excuse to attack them. Or – sharp intake of breath – some ‘feminists’ earn
a salary from employment that relies upon pointing the finger at examples of offence and so it is in
their deepest interests to exploit the deep mines of outrage, or even to create
some where none can be found. It’s super-cool to be a man-hater right now, like
possessing a popular pet breed or drinking the latest nutritional food
replacement…

While I could rant on for hours about the misguided puritanism
and dubious intentions of modern feminism, I have two serious concerns that
have prompted me to write this. My first concern is that if we keep shrieking
about the most banal and illusionary atrocities then men will begin to treat
all women with either kid-gloves or utter contempt. Male or female, if you are sympathetic to my thoughts so far then you are most probably either A) too
afraid to voice your opinions and you may have even have started avoiding contact
with particularly forthright women, orB)
called a sexist for voicing your opinions and treated like a social pariah which
in turn makes you feel incredibly frustrated. A plea to the men/women in class A – if you
are a decent and innocent person then you have nothing to fear. If anyone inflicts
guilt on you without good reason then they are the evil in society, not you. And
a plea to the men/women in class B – please don’t go firing off indiscriminately
in your anger and accusing all women of possessing the same puritanical viewpoints
because you might hit one of your many female allies like me. And you need us
on side, not against you. In addition, class B, bear in mind that there are many
genuine cases of oppression and exploitation out there that require and deserve
our full attention, so avoid falling into the trap of tarring everyone with the
same disdainful brush - point out the ridiculous but don’t be heartless.

That last point leads to my second and most serious concern: the new
breed of ‘feminists’ would do well to revisit The Boy Who Cried Wolf. I have personally
experienced instances of mistreatment in the past and I have friends who still
suffer real and serious mistreatment by men at work and/or in relationships. Amid
this maelstrom of faux rage, who will believe them when they speak out? If ‘feminists’
are focusing their attention on only the most convoluted and fashionable sources of outrage
then I fear that they will dilute the credibility of genuine cases, society will
tire of the incessant daily bandwagons and eventually we will all grow immune
to the most serious of allegations.

That’s all I have to say. I’m sorry if you hate me now. I
look forward to reposting this in the year 2050, when our society has eradicated
all forms of pleasure and we gather around pianos in the evenings by
candlelight, singing songs with lyrics that have been sanctioned by our
feminist overlords, covering our bodies that we are simultaneously encouraged
to celebrate and censor while the human race creeps evermore towards extinction
as men have become too afraid to approach women and women consider men so far
beneath them that they have stopped breeding. Please, for the sake of those women at risk of genuine harm or oppression and also for the sake of our
enjoyment of this passing glimmer of life that we get to experience, can both
sexes take a step back, reassess what constitutes the real problems of the
world and call this new puritanism out for what it really is – batshitcrazy rantings
by bored attention-seekers who are intent on diverting the spotlight to
themselves and their website hits/likes/RTs/view ratings/ego and away from the genuine
injustices that women face.

Thursday, 23 February 2017

It’s a perverse quirk of human nature that the more we
perceive someone to be immoral, a reject or an underdog, the more intensely we
are drawn to them. Movie reviews talk about the bad guys, like the Joker, in Batman films way more than Batman. We obsess
over a vampire or serial killer in a horror film, but we rarely remember the
hero. And we see the same phenomenon mirrored in real life. The pop star who treats women like
animals but tops the charts every week. The corrupt, bad boy footballer that
all the kids idolise. The pantomime villain in the reality TV show who wins the
viewer vote. But why do we root for these people when society tells us we
should find them repulsive?

Those of us who are sensitive to the faults of our humanity realise that when we are instructed to dislike someone or something and this instruction is vehemently enforced, particularly
by someone who we consider to be superior to ourselves, then we are inclined to rebel and do the complete opposite (think girls from strict homes who grow up
to be lap dancers, Catholics who grow up to be Satanists) or the taboo object/person
becomes forbidden fruit that is attractive to us and we develop an overwhelming desire for it (think celibate
priests who become paedophiles, how we desire fresh cream cakes even though we
know they will make us fat). Right now the media is feeding us a daily diet of evil
‘supervillains’ and we are repeatedly instructed to disagree with them and find
them repulsive - think Trump, Milo and Farage for starters. We obsess daily over these forbidden fruit supervillains to
such an extent that repeated exposure is highly likely to trigger the attraction effect in some of those who are exposed to it (by fostering
sympathy and generating an underdog that the public begins to rally behind) or we are likely to see a rebellious reaction, or a combination of the two. And we have already seen these responses play out in public forums. The more that the BBC pushed the remain vote, the more I suspected
we would have a Brexit vote. The more that social media humiliated Trump, the
more I suspected he would win the presidency. Humans are predictably rebellious
creatures, we don’t like being told what to do. So is it any surprise that the supervillains are seeing a surge in popularity?

Those who were appalled to
see the public rallying behind ‘the abhorrent’ should be quietly taken aside
and made aware that these events and the changing public sentiment may have arisen as a direct response to their
own actions. I wonder whether the popularity of these supervillains would
have grown to such heights had they not been nurtured by the media spotlight,
had we not been bombarded with constant outcry, outrage and protest through
news reports and social media. I experienced the U-turn effect of this
bombardment for myself a couple of weeks ago when I spotted a planned protest
on Twitter and audibly uttered the words ‘oh FFS, not another protest’. The
protest itself didn’t aggravate me and I generally agreed with the purpose of
the march, but it was one of several taking place that week so I was becoming
numb to them and, to be honest, a little irritated by the constant, exhausting barrage of outrage. Then I saw a news report on TV in which an incensed
protester grabbed a reporter’s microphone and started preaching into it “people
MUST ___, everyone MUST ___, if you don’t support ___ then you are EVIL!!”.
Whoah, wait a second my dear. I wholeheartedly agree with you, but who the hell are you to dictate to me what I should and shouldn’t think? My hackles were
raised and I viewed the protest in an entirely different light. These people were
dictating to me what I should and shouldn’t believe and what I can and can’t
say and I was annoyed by the tone of their
aggressive, self-righteous preaching. When they started ranting about the evils
of fascism, I burst out laughing. Pot and kettle? The next night I switched on
the news and saw something that I knew would piss that female protestor off and
I smiled to myself. For the first time I sided with the supposed 'enemy’ against someone
who I was supposed to sympathise with, simply because my brain went ‘no, fuck you, I won’t do what
you tell me to’. I was rooting for the supervillain.

Now this was just one ranting woman in a sea of protestors
that made me feel this way, but I wonder whether this isolated incident is
playing out on a grand scale amongst the general public who are exposed to the media’s
constant ridicule and condemnation of the supervillains. Take Hollywood and the
Jesus Christ Superstars, for example. We love celebrities when they prance
around on screen or knock out a decent album because that’s what we are paying
them to do. Katy Perry makes great music, J. K. Rowling writes great books and
Meryl Streep makes great movies, but when they start evangelising at award
ceremonies about how other people should live their lives, what they should and
shouldn’t say, and, even worse, passing judgement on what they can and can’t
think like some kind of award-clutching, superstar embodiment of Jesus Christ,
then things quickly turn sour. I’m interested to hear their thoughts on how the
lowly populace should live their lives and they are perfectly entitled to voice
them (who knows, they might even identify solutions to endemic social problems
that could revolutionise how we all live) however I suspect that they know fuck
all about what it’s like to live on an inner-city council estate - to worry
about housing, job security, who you are living amongst and the safety of those
you love - and once I get the faintest whiff that they are looking down their
noses at these people and telling them, with complete ignorance of the
challenges that they face on a day-to-day basis, that their concerns are misguided
or offensive whereas, on the contrary, they are more entitled to make a moral
judgement since they are socially mobile, richer, younger or more highly educated
than the average council-house dweller, then they morph into the ranting woman
in the protest and my hackles are raised again. J. K. Rowling, for instance,
preaches in such a nauseatingly self-righteous ‘pissing on the
peasants from my ivory tower’ way and with such painful disregard for how the
real world functions that I struggle at times to separate her from the trolls
that she dismissively bats away…

And I know I’m not the only person starting to feel like
this. There is an increasing groundswell of anti-Jesus Christ Superstar
sentiment on social media directed towards big stars who have stopped being the
jaunty puppets that we pay them to be and taken on the role of political
mouthpiece. Please, now more than ever, we need you to be jesters to make us
smile, singers to cheer us up, writers to take us away from reality, not a
dictatorial moral thought police. Even the BAFTA audience this year looked like
the residents from the Capitol in The Hunger Games, nodding sympathetically in
unison in a collective moral masturbationary exercise in the hope that their unblemished
souls will endear them to their peers, fans, ticket sales, book sales….The gulf
between these Jesus Christ Superstars and ‘the ordinary people’ is widening at
a rapid rate of knots and this rate it will swallow entire careers whole…

Perry, Rowling, Streep, ranting protest woman - you are
entitled to voice your opinions and I will defend your right to do so to the
death, but please, please wake up and realise that you are feeding the very monsters
that you are aiming to defeat. Each time you cast yourself as morally superior
and speak down to the ordinary people beneath you in an arrogant tone,
dismissing their concerns and casting out judgements, you alienate increasing
numbers of ordinary people and drive them away from you and towards those who
oppose you, regardless, I believe, of whether they consider your opinions to be
more or less ethically sound than those of the supervillains that they gravitate towards.
This is how conversions of loyalty are forced and oppositions gain power, for
instance I agreed with the ethics of the ranty protestor but I cheered on the
supervillain in order to see her defeated (never underestimate the fragility of
a woman’s principles when faced with someone that she takes an instant dislike
to). And the louder that you vilify and humiliate those that you oppose, the
greater you risk creating a rejected underdog towards whom the people will
express empathy since they perceive the underdog to be suffering the same
humiliation and rejection that you heap upon them too.

These are the underlying mechanics that are driving the rise of
the supervillains and they will continue to gain popularity under the media
spotlight and the barrage of your constant outrage and condemnation. After all,
we’re only human and we can’t help how we respond to instruction, unlike your
divine, virtuous selves…

Friday, 6 January 2017

On the first day of my first conference as a first-year
postgraduate, a male academic invited me back to his room. This academic was
married, twenty years my senior and I barely knew anything about him. I gracefully
declined at first but then, upon discovering that it was a time-honoured whisky
party to which a select number of delegates were invited each year and two of
my colleagues had also received the same invitation, I accepted. It was a fabulous
night and the whisky party became a regular event at the same conference each
year thereafter. The host is now one of my closest friends, I have met and stayed
with his wife and children and we continue to meet up as often as possible to
treat ourselves to good food, good wine and a good old gossip.

I was fortunate to meet such a delightful male academic at a
conference, but yes, I’ve also had uncomfortable experiences with men at conferences. I’ve
been stalked from seminar room to seminar room, hounded on social media and,
because my politeness is a hazard to my safety, I’ve left conferences clutching
phone numbers and email addresses that I’ve promptly binned. It’s an unsettling
feeling to say the least (especially when you’re both confined to the same
small venue for days on end) and it ruins any enjoyment of the conference. In fact
a particularly bad experience can even cause you to question whether you wish
to continue pursuing a career in the field.

In response to this unacceptable and evidently common
behaviour at conferences – and for some unfortunate folk for whom this is a
day-to-day struggle in their own university departments - there has been an emerging
groundswell amongst both female and male academics to scrutinise the behaviour
of male colleagues, to pummel them into the dirt the very second they put a
foot wrong and to hound those who exhibit behaviours not considered to be acceptable. Now if you’ve got Dr. Wandering Hands or Prof. A Women Should Not Have A Profession
in your department then a proactive approach is entirely justified; I agreed that we should
call them out and challenge them to account for their behaviour because these cretins
can stunt the career progression of a female academic and cause serious and long-lasting
damage to that individual’s confidence and motivation to continue teaching and
researching in their subject.

But thankfully, I have not witnessed this type of behaviour
in the men in my own department. There are 32 male academics and 27 female academics
in my department and each one of them is a pleasure to work with. I’m judging
them by our daily water cooler conversations of course and I have no idea
whether they have anyone stripped and hogtied on their basement floor, but over
the ten years that I have worked within my department I have not experienced
one moment of malicious misogyny or harassment. I’m sure that if I pored obsessively
over every daily conversation I could single-out one throwaway sexist gag or a
lazy misconception that would have the averagely-incensed feminist burning the building
down, but if a comment is made then it is not driven by malicious intent and I
am sure that the source would be devastated to discover that he/she had upset anyone.
On the whole our staff are mutually supportive of each other and our more
confident, aggressively competitive and ambitious members of the department tend
to be female (which is by no means a criticism, on the contrary it has
contributed significantly to the success of the department).

A couple of years ago the department was called to a meeting
to discuss harassment in the workplace. It wasn’t prompted by or directed at anyone
in particular, just a friendly chat with a professional on how the male members
of the department should behave around women and how they could offer support
and encouragement to their female colleagues. The meeting was very cordial and
we all agreed that we shared the same desire to support everyone equally and we
would strive to ensure that no-one felt disadvantaged, but, by God, things felt
awkward afterwards. Some male members of staff, particularly the older members
of the department who had known their female colleagues for many years, became
so over-sensitised to causing offence that the simplest actions and conversations
were painfully awkward and stilted. Colleagues that regularly dealt out mutually
received and well-meaning banter began apologising after making the most innocent
of comments, they overcompensated to the point of sounding patronising when
genuinely attempting to be supportive and they didn’t know whether it was acceptable
to enquire about family issues, illnesses or, in one case, congratulate a
member of the department on her pregnancy. Far from clipping the wings of Dr.
Wandering Hands or Prof. A Women Should Not Have A Profession, the advice that
these individuals received caused confusion, it completely killed the relaxed
atmosphere in the department and it turned the loveliest of people into socially
bungling, terrified bundles of nerves.

I realise that I am lucky to work with a respectful
group of people who do not require close scrutiny and criticism of their
behaviour while other departments and universities are in desperate need of
close attention and direction in order to make their working relationships
bearable, however some women in academia take a disproportionately aggressive approach
and they produce exceptionally venomous material that is directed towards male
academics in general. This approach sits very uncomfortably with me and, if I
am honest, their indefensible generalisations make me question whether the
issue is as prevalent as they claim or whether they hold university positions
or carry out research that relies heavily upon misogyny and harassment existing
in the workplace, to which a successful eradication of these behaviours would
put them out of a job. If I was a man I would take great offence upon hearing
these generalised attacks however it must be extremely difficult to engage with
this material as a male, hence I suspect why I am increasingly encountering women
working in university departments who, like me, feel sympathy towards our male
colleagues who endure criticism by virtue of assumptions made about their
gender rather than from their observed behaviour.

To those women in academia who are currently rampaging through
university departments and sticking both barrels into the gullet of every man
they see, I would offer this note of caution: know your enemy.By all
means aim for the bad guys and I will buy you all the ammo that you need to
take them down, but please don’t take the scattergun approach because you’re
taking good people down with them. In my experience, the good guys outnumber
the bad and for every creepy guy who follows you around the room at a conference
trying to give you his mobile number, there is a guy who would like to invite
you to a whisky party because he admires your work and he would like to talk to
you about it. Or there is a male member of staff who feels socially awkward at
the best of times and he would like to engage more with his colleagues, but he’s
afraid to speak up in case he plays the game incorrectly and says the wrong thing. Or
there is an older male member of staff who has the deepest respect for the
women that he works with, but he’s afraid to congratulate an administrator on
her pregnancy in case he is considered to be speaking out of turn. Certainly there are monsters who target women in all walks
of life and we must raise awareness and strive to keep each other safe, we must
ensure that no-one is disadvantaged due to their gender and we must seek to punish
those of any gender who behave abysmally towards their colleagues, but we
should also guard against demonising a whole swathe of men based upon generalised conjecture and thereby behaving precisely like the same tyrannical, presumptive and intolerant
monsters that we are fighting against.

Saturday, 14 May 2016

Xylophones have a lot to answer for in terms of my
educational development.

I was obsessed with the xylophone when I was a child. I didn’t
possess the confidence to sing, I wouldn’t be seen dead with a tambourine and
the recorder required far too much effort, so the xylophone was the perfect
choice to satisfy the minimum energy required to make a substantially disruptive
noise in my primary school assemblies. It was during one of these assemblies
that the local vicar, who was tasked with directing our cacophonous shambles of
a school band, noticed the wild enthusiasm with which I bashed the xylophone
bars and asked me whether I had ever considered playing the piano. I was
completely enamoured with the idea and promptly began pestering my parents for
a piano and piano lessons. My mum was a housewife and my dad worked shifts in a
foundry so this wasn’t something that they could easily afford, but they
eventually caved against my persistent nagging and approached my class teacher
at a parents’ evening to ask whether the school had any provision for music
lessons. The teacher consulted with Mrs. Guest, my strict and rather rotund and
red-faced headmistress, to ask whether piano lessons could be arranged and Mrs.
Guest’s answer was sharp and to the point: children from my council estate 'did
not do things like learning to play the piano' and it was ridiculous of my
parents to encourage a child like me to aspire to do such things.

My parents accepted this response and broke the bad news to
me. I was devastated. However the school vicar was not going to allow me give
up on my dreams that easily. He arranged for me to have piano lessons from an
elderly lady who lived locally (she charged very little for lessons because she
lived alone and enjoyed the company of visitors) and my parents bought me a
second-hand piano which we shoehorned into my tiny bedroom in our two-bed
council house. When I passed my Grade 3 piano, my mother confided in me that she
was pleased that I had persevered with my lessons because my parents had
thought (hoped, I would imagine) that my musical ambitions were a passing
phase. She also told me what Mrs. Guest had said to them when they had enquired
about piano lessons.

My headmistress’s comments were like a red rag to a bull –
how dare she say that my friends and I shouldn’t aspire to achieve our dreams
just because we live in a deprived area! I tell people now that I rattled
through my piano grades so that I could entertain the masses, teach a new
generation of pianists and learn a skill that would enhance my cognitive
development, but my main, if not sole, motivation was to prove my headmistress
wrong. I have a distinction in Grade 8 piano. Fuck you Mrs. Guest.

Growing up on a council estate in Birmingham, I encountered
the ‘children who shouldn’t aspire’ attitude numerous times throughout my
school life. My high school hit the very bottom of the league tables while I
was in my final GCSE year and it was widely expected amongst both the staff and
students alike that the girls would fail their GCSEs and banging out a dozen babies
while sitting on the dole and the boys would fail their GCSEs and become career
criminals, winding up in trouble with the police or locked up. One teacher even
told my class that we should start planning a family early because infant
mortality was high in the area due to its deprived nature, so there was a
good chance that some of our babies would die…

It was when the children on the estate challenged these
preconceptions that things got really interesting. My best friend at high
school desperately wanted to be a lawyer and she needed A-Levels in order to
apply to university, so we bravely asked our teachers if it would be possible
to study for an A-Level together. No kids in my school had ever taken an A-Level
let alone applied to university before so the teachers thought that we were
crazy and completely out of our depth. Nevertheless they agreed to let us sit
A-Level English Literature on the condition that we did the required reading ourselves,
with some guidance from a business teacher who had experience in teaching A-Level
courses. I took the class solely to support my friend and I had no intention of
applying for university myself – after all, my parents certainly couldn’t
afford the fees - but when I began accompanying my friend to various university
open days I liked what I saw and started thinking seriously about whether I
wanted to pursue the same educational path…

I enrolled on a series of A-Level evening classes at a
nearby college and cobbled together a mishmash of grades that made me a pretty
poor candidate for a red brick university, but I bit the bullet and applied to
the University of Birmingham. The admissions tutor was tethered firmly by the
entry requirement grades, but after a short interview he surprised me by saying
that he would make an exception in my case because ‘I had a something about
me’. Throughout the entire first year of my undergraduate course I felt as
though I had broken into the place or stolen a legitimate student’s identity
and I suffered great anxieties about whether I was ‘good enough’. Some students
had come from well-performing schools where they had been rigorously trained to
perform to a high standard, but there were also a few students from less
privileged backgrounds in or around Birmingham who had similar educational experiences
to mine. By the end of my first year, it was clear that some of the high
performing students were struggling to function outside a
controlled, classroom environment. They could absorb and regurgitate
information but they could not think for themselves and many of them started to
drop out of the course as a result. On the other hand, those of us who had been
previously cast adrift with our educational development and who were frequently required to think for
ourselves were thriving in this environment and most of our group achieved a
2:1 or higher. This ‘child that shouldn’t aspire’ arrived with a dismal set of
A-Level grades and graduated with a high first class degree (the only first in
my year), winning a series of prestigious scholarships, moving quickly onto an
MPhil and finally completing a PhD. I suspect that the ‘something’ about me
that the admissions tutor had spotted was the same ‘something’ that each one of
us in the less educationally privileged group of students possessed; namely the
ability to think for ourselves and to cope when left alone to conduct research
and develop our own arguments, independently of direction from a teacher or
classroom environment.

But it’s not just the hidden abilities of the ‘child that
shouldn’t aspire’ to achieve academic qualifications that I wanted to address,
it’s their experience of the university environment too. I am now on the senior
professional management team of the same university department in which I was a
student and I have day-to-day dealings with students that started out exactly
like me. I see the same hesitations and anxieties in them that I had when I
first arrived. So where do these anxieties come from? If I was to turn back the
clock and speak to every child who wants to go to university but has concerns about
how they will be perceived then I would tell them this: don't be put off by
thoughts of inadequacy based on perceptions of higher education that you might
have in your head. I spent years passing by the red brick wall of the
University of Birmingham and believing that the Hogwarts-like building in the
distance was full of pompous professors who wouldn’t give disadvantaged
students a second glance and wouldn't know real struggle and hard work if it
bit them on the ass. But once I stepped inside the red brick wall as an
undergraduate student I quickly realised that my university is nowhere near the snooty
bastion of pomp and ceremony that I expected it to be and any feelings of
inadequacy had completely dissolved by the time I reached graduation. Most
people that I encounter on campus are lovely, down-to-earth people who have a
lot of time for students from all backgrounds and I regularly speak to
colleagues and students who have had similar educational experiences to mine (I
currently work with a very talented doctoral researcher who grew up on murder
mile in Hackney!). Now I’m one of those people behind that red brick wall and
let me assure you, I’m very much still in touch with that little girl who
played the xylophone in school assemblies and I know what it’s like to dream
big, work hard and have real monsters stand in your way. I am no monster and
neither are my colleagues - you have no need to be afraid of us. If you’re
still unsure then book onto an open day and speak to some of the staff and
students about what it’s like to study at their institution. Hopefully just
taking the first physical step inside the wall and engaging with the people behind
it will eliminate a great deal of your fears. And take it from me; do not be
intimidated by class perceptions or how someone looks, behaves or speaks in a
higher education environment because these things are certainly no indicator of
intellectual ability. I have seen pipe-smoking, plum-mouthed professors
struggle to open a door or operate the simplest mobile phone. Intelligence doesn’t
have a face, tone of voice or tweed suit.

I would also like to address the kids who feel that they are
being pushed into higher education when it really isn’t their thing. Parents
and educational authorities alike can be guilty of this. We freely encourage every
child to fulfil their educational potential but we struggle to admit that some
children just don’t possess the capacity for academic study. There are always
going to be things that children – and adults too, for that matter - are good at
and things that we are bad at. For instance, I can play the piano very well but
there are lots of other things that I’m absolutely hopeless at - I can’t swim,
I can’t play the guitar (despite trying to teach myself hundreds of times) and
I can’t run long distances without collapsing in a sweaty heap. I accept that I
do well in some things but I’m awful in others. Likewise academic ability is
something that you either possess or you don’t and some school leavers are just
not cut out for higher education in the same way that I’m not cut out to swim
the channel. Simple as. There is no shame in accepting that you are not
academically minded and many students leave school without qualifications and develop
specialised and valuable practical skills that allow them to take up practical
roles and become experts in their craft. These practical roles tend to be
undervalued due to our obsession with pushing all students down the path of
higher education, even when the student feels that it isn’t a good fit for
them. As a graduate I find this obsession with the pursuit of higher education
at the expense of practical skills difficult to understand because university
education is *not* the be-all-and-end-all that some people talk it up to be, it
is not a guaranteed open door to a dream job and it certainly doesn’t make you
any more superior to the next person. I have witnessed how the professors in my
department are genuinely grateful when an IT person arrives to fix their
computer or a maintenance person comes to fix a light or repaint their office.
No matter how academically qualified you are you will always depend upon and
value those around you with practical skills.

In addition to the academically minded and the practically
minded, there is a third type of school leaver that educational bodies need to
be aware of:the chancer. Thinking back
to the student cohort at my school, there were a number of kids who exhibited a
genuine flair for study or practical skills, but alongside these students there
were also out-and-out chancers who wanted a piece of the same opportunities and
achievements without putting in any effort or hard work whatsoever. They had no interest in gaining qualifications or skills, but they were acutely interested in avoiding employment. And coming
from a disadvantaged background gave them a claim to preferential treatment and
the free pass that they were looking for. Dangers arise when admitting these
free-pass-grabbing students to a higher education institution just to tick a
quota box or feel like you’re helping the disadvantaged in some patronising and
self-righteous way. If every single school leaver, regardless of academic
ability, demands equal access to higher education then we will end up with a
quagmire of students who blindly dredge their way through a course of education
that they care very little about, dragging the genuinely capable students down
with their indifference and leaving with the same copycat qualifications.
Employers will struggle to differentiate between a job application from a
genuinely capable student and a chancer and eventually the qualifications that
they both possess will become worthless. If we give trophies to everyone who
runs a race then how are we going to pick out the ones that we should train to
be Olympians? As gratifying as it would have been to see everyone in my high
school class achieve a university place and prove the Mrs. Guests of the world
wrong, I’m also a realist and I’m well aware that amongst the genuine students
seeking help there are also chancers looking to take advantage of freely
available opportunities and milk them for all they're worth. If a student from
a disadvantaged background pleads for special treatment and expects to be
handed a qualification on a plate with no application of hard work or effort whatsoever
then there is a very good chance that they will fail. And educators should not
feel guilty or responsible when that happens. It's tough, but that’s life.

To my former teachers and those teachers who still advocate
the Mrs. Guest approach to educational privilege, I would say this: resist
predicting the growth potential of students based entirely upon their parent’s
occupation or whether a student comes from an impoverished or affluent area because,
at best, you’re going to show your age. Gone are the days when library access
was restricted to wealthy schools and knowledge was largely passed down from
parent to child; we are living in the age of Google where children are growing
up with access to more information at their fingertips than ever before. Young
people are taking control of their own educational development and it is very
difficult, if not impossible, to restrict knowledge to a social class or
geographical location. With instant access to an extensive world of knowledge, it
is a child’s personal motivation and inner drive that will determine what they
do with it. My undergraduate university experience taught me that battery-farming
students in a well-performing school is no guaranteed indicator of success and
‘children that shouldn’t aspire’ can be just as capable, if not more capable,
than the children that are naturally expected to succeed. I would suggest that
children who work independently to achieve something that they desperately want
for themselves are often the ones that are best equipped to persevere with a
course of study, to be intensely self-motivated and survive the challenging
times that all students face. A tough skin and dogged determination cannot be
taught in a classroom and yet these are essential tools when pursuing a
university education. And please stop pushing all school leavers into academic
study at the expense of practical skills. We should be celebrating and
empowering those who are gifted with practical skills rather than viewing them
as somehow incapable of higher education. I would much prefer to live in a
world filled with people that can build houses than a world full of people who ruminate
on how to build a house…

My final point is directed to those who, like me, have
followed an unconventional route through higher education and still work within
it. Talk to the kids out there who show academic potential and express an
interest in applying to university but have had their confidence knocked by
poor educators or feel somehow inadequate at the thought of attending
university alongside the privileged kids. Tell them about the scholarships and
resources that are available to help them to gain access to courses (I am
living proof that these work) and give them the confidence that they need to go
to open days and submit applications. And, most importantly, show them that
there are no monsters behind the red brick wall and many of us in university
departments are just like them. Who knows, they might just end up running the
place…

Saturday, 31 January 2015

Imagine
that you have a friend, named Marie. And Marie has two young boys – Charlie
(11) and Peter (7).

Marie has a number of personality defects that are difficult to manage; she is
extremely loud and attention-seeking, prone to creating
unnecessary drama in order to draw attention to herself, unwilling to engage
with reality to the point of being delusional and a well known compulsive liar.
She has lost an untold number of friends due to her difficult and demanding
personality, but you have stuck beside her and turned a blind eye to these
failings, while still maintaining awareness that everything she tells you may
not be completely the truth.

Charlie, Marie’s firstborn child, is a quiet but pleasant child and his
introverted personality is blamed on a number of complications surrounding his
birth, although the details of these complications change each time Marie
recounts the story of his birth. Marie frequently tells people that Charlie was
‘brain damaged’ during labour and ‘he can’t help the way that he is’, although
spending time with Marie and Charlie suggests that there are other factors that
might be to blame.

Marie was unsure how to care for Charlie when he was a baby and at one point he
was rushed into hospital as an emergency case. Social workers criticised her
level of care, but she was allowed to continue caring for him. Marie kept
Charlie unnaturally close to her and treated him like a doll, not allowing him
to socialise with other children, sitting him inches away from the TV in his
baby chair all day, rarely engaging with him and having no interest whatsoever
in his educational development. At the age of five he was unable to speak and
would 'babble' a combination of grunts, noises and baby words in order to
communicate. Marie blamed Charlie's slow development on a number of factors - his traumatic
birth, brain defects (‘he has half a brain’) and various allergies and
phobias - but time after time she would ignore him for hours on end and he would stand inches in
front of the TV or sit at the computer for hours (the TV screen was
covered with his handprints). He would feed himself on crisps and yoghurt, constantly complain that he was hungry and on the odd occasion that a meal was prepared for him he appeared to live on a diet of supernoodles and pizza.

As he grew older, Marie revelled in the fact that
he was completely dependent on her and she would tell people – often in his
presence – that he was 'disabled', incapable of the most basic functions and he
couldn’t possibly leave the house, walk anywhere, socialise with other children
etc, while friends and family knew full well that Charlie was completely
capable of these things and he was a very bright, physically able boy who was
interested in learning about the world around him (when the family went on holiday with Charlie's uncle, the uncle became so concerned about how Charlie was treated by Marie that he questioned Marie's ability to be a mother and raised the matter with Charlie's father, which resulted in an argument and the holiday being cut short). Marie would encourage people
to buy toys for Charlie rather than educational presents such as books as he
‘couldn’t cope with them’ and at one point she attacked the school for buying
him a maths set. She claimed that he was unable to fly or travel on public
transport because his muscles hadn't developed properly and they had thrown his knee joints out, but he walked and ran around like a normal boy, took the bus very happily on numerous occasions and the
family regularly enjoyed holidays abroad. She would revel in the attention that Charlie's 'disabilities'
bought her from strangers, to the extent that she would regularly lament
about his problems to strangers when out in public and she would tell people that he has
non-existent special arrangements made for his care at home, such as light and stimulation
rooms. The impression that she gave to strangers in the street was that
Charlie was a heavily disabled child in a non-responsive and vegetative
state.

Interestingly, Marie spent a few years working in a school for children with severe physical and learning disabilities and she grew close to one child in particular. She had photos of the child - who was clearly severely disabled and in a wheelchair - around her house and she would tell me how people would flock to him and his mother and offer their help and support. He was clearly a popular little boy and when he died there was an outpouring of grief from everyone who knew him. When listening to Marie talking about Charlie, it felt as though she was describing this child rather than Charlie.

Now, imagine you had this friend. How would you explain her behaviour? Would it
make any difference if I told you that Marie was claiming benefits for Charlie
which meant that she didn’t have to work full-time and she was given an annual
£500 holiday allowance (plus cash sums for garden toys etc) for Charlie? And
she enrolled him at a 'special school', which provided door-to-door transport for him so
that she didn’t have to take him to school in the mornings? And every morning
she would deposit Charlie at a neighbour's house - or anyone who was at
home nearby - so that the transport could collect him while she left for her part-time
job at - most distressingly - a local nursery?

The most upsetting aspect of this story is that as Charlie is growing older he
is starting to show signs of emerging from his cage - his speech has improved
to the point that is possible to have a conversation with him and he is showing
an interest in his education - but his behaviour is becoming increasingly odd.
He talks to himself all the time, he exhibits repetitive and obsessive behaviour
and the subjects that he talks about are very bizarre. He still sits in front
of YouTube all day long, barely eats and doesn't go outside or socialise with other children,
but Marie is aware that he is maturing rapidly and she will soon lose the ability to convince him
and others that he is 'disabled' - and she will therefore lose all the benefits
that she enjoys as a result - so she is fiercely thwarting any attempt that he
makes to normalise. She is currently making the case for Charlie to move up to a senior 'special school' where the travel arrangements and special attention will continue (even though his father believes that it
would do him the world of good to go to the local senior school and mix with
the 'normal children') and she is even turning her attention to his younger
brother Peter as a potential replacement, who she is having tested for all kinds of problems ranging from
dyslexia to sight problems and investigating the systems and benefits that are available to help him.

Marie's desire to continue enjoying the transport arrangements that give her
stress-free mornings, the cash benefits that fund shopping trips and - her
favourite and often lauded benefit - the financial cushion to work a handful of hours
each week in a local nursery and spend the remainder of her time sitting on the
sofa and watching TV, means that she is more than happy to hamper the
development of her own child and continue to obstruct it for as long as possible.
But it is not only the treatment of her own child that could be suffering -
Marie has worked with children for a long time and she continues to work as a deputy
manager at a local nursery, where she laments the 'paperwork and red tape' and
encourages 'free play' as much as possible. One one occasion a parent made a complaint because they arrived early to find the children sat in front of a TV...

Now, imagine you had this friend. Could you live with yourself, knowing that
this was happening? Would you save poor Charlie? Or would you save your
friendship and continue to turn a blind eye?